Category: issues

“One does not make art neatly. … This activity does not lend itself to the strictures of planning. And artists naturally rebel if a board attempts to make them create work in a straight line. But good arts managers know how to segment off this part of the work from the rest of the organizational efforts.”

“[O]ver the past decade much of our ‘critical’ cultural has degenerated into a glorified form of punditry, in which critics have forsaken their role as compassionate arbiters for the barbed joys of snark.”

“Up to 95,000 descendants of the prophet Muhammad are planning to bring a libel action in Britain over ‘blasphemous’ cartoons of the founder of Islam, even though they were published in the Danish press.”

The destination, suggests Michiko Kakutani, could be something like David Shields’s new book, Reality Hunger, which “consists [almost entirely] of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow – quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context.”

It was back before anime, or California Zen, or Whistler painting women in kimonos, or even The Mikado. In 1860, a group of samurai diplomats arrived in San Francisco on a state visit and made their way to New York and Washington, attracting cheering crowds. The excitement of the encounter on both sides promptly disappeared amidst each country’s civil war.

“At first, three discreetly covered slender models tottered self-consciously on very high heels. Seated at a table was Vu Nhat Tan, Vietnam’s leading avant-garde composer, there to provide an electronica background as Phuong Vu Manh began to systematically apply a wash of color to each model – one red, one blue, one green. … Tan gradually built a wall of elaborately inventive sound while Manh elaborately decorated his ladies into Avatar-like beings.”

“There will be no political interference,” promised Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House and chairman of the Cultural Olympiad board. Said the Olympiad’s artistic director, Ruth Mackenzie: “One might imagine that even the politicians have learned from the millennium dome that you need to have clear artistic leadership.”

“The theme running throughout the three-week festival is … drawing attention to those cultures that naturally look to the Pacific rather than the Atlantic, whether that be a dance company from Auckland or orchestras specialising in the music of 15th-century [sic] Bolivia and Mexico.” There will be top modern theatre companies from North and South America, Australian composer Brett Dean’s new opera, an 18th-century German take on Moctezuma, and Porgy and Bess in French.

“By Culture Monster’s count, 73 of the 1,011 souls that Forbes pegs as worth $1 billion to $53.5 billion (the estimated worth of Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, top dog on this year’s list) have their main residences in California. Thirty-one live in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, and 42 in Silicon Valley and points north.”

The two-phase project – designed by Polshek Partnership Architects and planned for the warmer months of the next two years – will expand the ground-floor lobby, add restrooms, install a sprung-wood stage floor for dance, improve seating and sightlines, and restore much of the building’s neo-Moorish décor.